


Thursday's Child

by webcricket



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Human Castiel (Supernatural), dadstiel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:09:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21946369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/webcricket/pseuds/webcricket
Summary: You knew him as Steve, a sweet man with sad blue eyes that seemed to light up in your presence. He worked at the Gas-N-Sip where you grabbed your morning coffee; he worked there, but he didn’t seem to belong there, or even to this world. Little by little he stole your heart, and then he stole from your bed without a word and would have slipped out of your life forever if not for the life he left kindling in your womb.Eight years later, when your daughter began to ask about her daddy, you began to piece together the puzzle pieces of who he was and where he went. Steve, Jimmy, Castiel, and a host of other aliases - a weird whirlwind of chaos and unanswered questions criss-crossed the country in his wake. When you finally catch a break from a sympathetic sheriff in Sioux Falls, South Dakota caring for the other daughter Jimmy - or whatever he chose to call himself - abandoned, and she facilitates a meeting between the two of you, all that remains is to ask him why.And Castiel - the seraph battered back and forth between Heaven and Earth, emotionally bloodied in his quest for belonging, and fresh off a rupture with the Winchesters - discovers the family he has longed for was out there waiting all along.
Relationships: Castiel (Supernatural)/You
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	Thursday's Child

You walked into the Gas-N-Sip onto a scene a match stick strike short of complete chaos. Beyond the sea of customers waiting at the counter, the grumbled volume of their impatience rising like a storm’s tide breaking on a rocky shore, you saw not the blue-eyed sales associate you sought for, but the ragged figure of the manager, Nora, as she slammed her fist against the side of the cash register to compel its cooperation.

The machine spat its contents out in a metallic ding barely audible above the thunder of discontent. Nora flung a handful of crumpled bills at the gaping man stood before her and waved him toward the door with his uncapped cup of cold coffee without a word regarding well wishes for the goodness of the day.

The frazzled blonde jabbed a finger at her temple, peered blankly over the counter, and muttered, “Can I help whose next?” in a manner that made whomsoever was next dither in presenting themselves for customer service slaughter, and two people leave without getting the gasoline they came for - one of whom had trudged there on foot through the snow uphill in a pair of threadbare tangerine Converse after their car ran out of juice three miles down the road.

As the sea swelled in murmured confusion over who was next, you dove into the crush of shoulders and shoved a path through to the front.

Pressed into the counter, you jostled a carousel display of novelty keychains, the inconvenient disturbance of which, more than your voice, caught Nora’s strained attention. “Nora!” you panted. Caging the scattering of metal rings within your elbows to prevent their clattering to the floor, you ignored the nicotine-husked scolding of a wrinkled weather-worn woman sounding in your ear about cutting the line.

“Y/N?” A flicker of hope lightened Nora’s craggy sleep-deprived aspect at the sight of you. “Have you seen Steve?” Clutching at your wrist, she asked the desperate-toned question before you could, unknowingly answering yours in its sameness. “He hasn’t been in for two days. No call out. Nothing. That’s not like him.”

Cheeks paling, you agreed – conscientious to a fault, it wasn’t like him at all to just disappear.

The sickly sense of suspicion festering in your stomach during the last forty-eight hours that began upon waking to empty sheets and fattened itself not on food, because you’d barely eaten under the barrage of worried emotions, but rather fed on a gluttony of unreturned calls and texts, shuddered and flipped with enough weight to unsteady your feet; wrist yanked from her grip, you flattened your palm to the front of your jeans as an awareness of imminent ill shot sour bile up your gullet.

You shook your head; taking a second, you choked back the throat-searing fluid and fortified your dizzied balance against the confirmation he had indeed gone without a trace. “N-no, I haven’t-” you sputtered- “I-I was hoping-”

Cutting you off, unable to hear anything beyond the unhelpful news of your weakly uttered ‘No,’ frustration rutted her sweat-beaded forehead. “Well when you do see him, tell him he’s fired. He left me in the middle of a mess of inventory and I haven’t had anyone to open. For fuck’s sake, it’s the holidays! I’m in a real lurch here.” Wheezing to reach for the final bit of breath required to bellow out her contained fury, she gestured at the crowd and flashed the one or two nearest folks shocked by her expletive outburst a conciliatory service industry contrived smile.

“If-if you see him-” you attempted to request the returned favor through the burst levy of her rage as the woman spewing insults about your impudence wedged between you and the counter to demand immediate attention. Funneled in defeat to the center of the store, you broke for the bathroom before the wet brim of heartache flooded your lashes and a renewed heave of nausea hollowed your belly of its fill of woe.

<<<>>>

“Mama?” The girl outfitted in pastel blue and magenta feather-bedecked fleece footie pajamas curled on the bed beside you stirred sleepily in the crook of your arm; the friction of her minute movements and dry forced heat air of winter combined sparked a static shock where the soft warmth of her bare fingers brushed your own calloused cooler ones.

“Yeah, honeybee?” Swiveling your concentration from the pages of the storybook held above the both of you, you closed the pages and sniffed your reply ticklishly into the freshly washed soap-smell of your daughter’s scalp – the scent of her a welcome haven from the heady aromas clinging to you of yeasted bread, warmed spice, and browned sugar that otherwise denoted a hectic day spent toiling in the bakery and sweet shop you operated below the small apartment.

She squirmed and giggled beneath your unrelenting Eskimo kisses until, fidgeting sideways to evade and escape, she squealed mid-laugh a query so completely unrelated to the book you’d been reading aloud minutes before it took you aback. “Where’s daddy?”

Her innocent and wholly natural curiosity stilled your showering of affection, seized at the center of your chest to steal your breath, and skipped your heart a few agonizing beats, but only a few; you’d grown emotionally numb over many years to the hurt of not knowing what happened with her father, of trying to reconcile your questions with a lack of answers in order to figure out what you did wrong, if anything, to warrant Steve’s disappearance from your life – and his own - without a goodbye, a warning, or so much as an inkling of a reason.

Although you tried and mostly succeeded in tidily boxing up the train wreck aftermath of emotion in your brain, he remained nonetheless an enigma forever in front of you because she was his; she wore his smile, albeit a bit easier and more often than he did; she saw the world through that same shade of inwardly illuminated blue, giving everyone she gazed upon the benefit of the doubt; she treated everything she touched, too, with a kindness, carefulness, and consideration so like him.

He endured even in his absence as an end without an end - the only proofs of the brief love-swept spell of him having been in your life a blunted memory stonewashed by time to dull the jagged edge of loss in believing he was the best thing to ever happen to you, and the life he sparked in your womb, a little girl who turned out to be what he wasn’t – the love of your life.

Yet despite the distance of years and the layers of a life well-lived laid on top of past pain, and like the first time you met him, every once in a while, when you least expected it, in moments when you were most relaxed, his recollection had a way of taking you by surprise such that you forgot how to breathe. 

Her inquisitiveness, however, did not; she asked after him on occasion, especially now that she was in school and of an age to notice and wonder at the differences between her family and those of her classmates.

“Max has _two_ daddies.”

Her observation, spoken in an airy awe punctuated by a yawn, penetrated your reverie into the past.

“That so?” Shifting up onto an elbow to better study the seriousness scrunching up her nose, you smoothed her disheveled hair into a chestnut halo of bouncy ringlets encircling her head on the polka dot patterned pillowcase; your fingertips fondly followed a wild whorl rebelling above her ear.

“Mm-hmm,” she drowsily drew out the noise, blinking heavily-lashed eyes that danced over the neon glow of star stickers arranged in constellations on the ceiling. With a mumbled, “and a dog, too” -she tossed the blanket, burrowed face-first into the pillow, and fell soundly asleep.

Staying absolutely motionless, you praised in grateful silence the sudden seizure of slumber children are wont to succumb to for temporarily relieving you from an explanation; whatever she dreamed of would be better than the reality of not knowing you had to offer.

You slipped from the bed and into the hallway, flicking lights off as you walked the worn oriental carpet runner to your bedroom, and found yourself standing in front of the closet digging for a shoebox stuffed in the topmost corner behind a stack of spare sheets.

Extricating the box with a grunt, you sunk to the floor, pushed off the lid, and dumped the contents, those few physical scraps you possessed of Steve - notes, snapshots, and the crumbling petals of a pressed red rose he left behind besides the scars on your heart and her - into your lap.

Last season, perched on Santa’s lap at the mall, your daughter told the falsely bearded jolly supplier of holiday spirit and maker of childhood magic she wanted him to bring her daddy home for Christmas. The pitying frowns donned by Saint Nick and his helper elf upon hearing her request haunted you for weeks afterward. The bright pink bike you bought to place under the tree as her big gift that year seemed a paltry substitute for what she really longed for.

It also prompted you to hire a private investigator to track Steve down. You hadn’t looked for him before then – you’d gotten on just fine without him; but it was becoming clear she needed to know him, if not as the father figure she idealized, at least as a means for both of you to get some kind of closure.

Part of you supposed regardless of why he left he should know he had a daughter and it was unfair - however unfairly he’d treated you - to keep her to yourself when you’d created her together. Whether he wanted to be a part of her life once he knew he’d not only deserted you, but left you knocked up, heartbroken, jobless, and in deep debt holding a newly minted mortgage for a building in need of major renovations before you could bake up that first batch of blueberry scones and realize a long-imagined dream – a dream he inspired you to pursue - would be entirely up to him.

Maybe you’d hesitated to look for so long because you felt he would want to be in your lives out of a sense of obligation rather than any emotive attachment of fatherly feeling; whatever had happened, the Steve you loved was a good man – dutiful of responsibilities to a fault. But Steve chose to leave and you wondered if he’d feel more trapped than anything if he knew there was a child; that he would be there like a hare snagged in a hunter’s snare awaiting fate, but that he wouldn’t want to be there.

In terms of fairness, that consequence wouldn’t be fair to any of you.

You eyed the sealed legal-sized manila envelope folded in half and jammed in the bottom of the emptied box. The part of you that preferred not knowing and defaulted to pigeonholing pain instead of dealing with it stuck it in there a month ago when the backlogged and grandfatherly private investigator working for literal beans of the brewed coffee variety and a weekly doughnut delivery as a personal favor to you got around to handing his findings over along with the kindly-intended counsel that he’d uncovered enough of the big picture to deem the case concluded, and it was up to you to decide whether it was worth hunting the guy down for a face-to-face to fill in the remainder of the damnable details.

Tucking the document into your outstretched hand – the fingers suffering from a nervy tremble no amount of suppressive will would quiet - he strongly cautioned against the latter pursuit of an in person meet up on the basis of having had decades of not so positive experience with quote unquote, “This same sort of dead beat dodging child support.”

Bolstering your resolve to learn the truth with a lungful of air, you slid a finger into the glue affixed gap of the envelope; the flap sliced your flesh as you tore into the paper. Soothing the slash against the warmth of your tongue, you slipped free the sheets within and rotated the cover page to scan the paragraph typed thereon – it comprised a summary of the steps the investigator took, contained a list of contacts in South Dakota and Kansas – potential current states of residence based on credit card activity - should you want to trail him further, and provided a social security number along with a name in bold uppercase print: JIMMY NOVAK.

A noose of nerves cinched tightly at your throat. The last thing you expected was an outright lie.

Steve … _no_ , Jimmy, he carried a sadness in the slouch of his shoulders, a something secretive that distanced his gaze sometimes; he told you he lost everything - his family, his home - that he started over with nothing save the two feet he landed on to build a foundation. You believed him, respected his fortitude to move forward, and loved him enough not to push him to talk about a past obviously painful to him until he was ready.

You never dreamed what he meant to say was everything you knew of him, everything he shared, was a fabrication built not to move on from the truth, but to hide it from you.

The whoosh of your pulse pounded in your ears; vision tunneled, the panicked pump of racing blood blackened the periphery of the white sheet when you turned to the next page.

Written there was the fact Jimmy had another family; had a daughter – Claire. He left them, too. He hadn’t lost his family and home, he ran out on them just like he ran out on you.

“Mama?” Dainty fingers tapped at the damp shine of your cheek; she crept in so quietly you hadn’t heard the tip-toe tread of her bare feet on the carpet. “Mama?” she said it again, a broken whisper verging on a sob, and tangled her limbs around your neck.

You shoved the papers off your crossed legs and pulled the ball of her body into your embrace. “What’s wrong, baby bee?” Blinking to staunch the sting of your tears, your piqued emotion surrendered to a roused motherly alarm as you folded the mess of her sweat-matted hair to your bosom where she could hear the reassuring thump-thump housed within.

“I had a bad dream,” she murmured and fisted the fabric of your robe.

Me, too, you thought, and snuggled her in tighter.

Glancing at the discarded report amid the box’s other trinkets, your bleary gaze landed on a glossy polaroid photo of you and Steve snapped at a holiday party you goaded him into attending with you when your original plus one ditched you at the last minute so you wouldn’t have to face alone a roomful of tipsy marketing execs you loathed. 

That night, that moment, his fingers flirting hesitatingly at your waist, touches giving in to the pull of gravity as the night wore on to graze then hug your hips as if they belonged there - had always been there - a confidant and comfort tenderly testing the territory of _more_ \- you naïvely yielding like pliant putty to his touch - that was the point of no return; through the retrospective filter of the truth it became clear he seemed too good to be true, because nothing about him was true.

Part of you wished you could reseal the envelope and the truth with it and return to the comparative bliss of not knowing. Mostly you seethed, an unprocessed anger relegated to the back-burner ignited, inflaming mind and muscle until your entire frame radiated a heat of rage.

The girl quaking in your grasp, bend of her spine shivering as you skimmed it in soothing caresses, reminded you some nightmares do evolve to have happy endings; no matter what happened, or what would happen, you had her and he couldn’t take that away from you.

Wiping her fear and tear flushed features into your pajamas, she gasped a desire that plunged daggers through your heart. “I want my daddy.”

“It’s okay, I’ve got you,” you spoke in a whisper to shush her whimpers and calm the heated tempest of your nerves. 

She went limp wrapped in the safety of your words and arms; you’d do anything for her, including suffer pain and swallow your pride to dredge up a monster from the past. You only prayed he wouldn’t hurt her, too.


End file.
